A gentle rain was falling at Digman Reserve, Newport, when a 194-centimetre behemoth batsman scored 90 off 30 balls then bowled gentle off-spin to a 12-year-old schoolboy.
Welcome to the open-age, enthusiastically multicultural Mid-Year Cricket Association’s fifth annual competition.
Played from noon to 4.45pm on Saturdays on reliably green synthetic wickets usually surrounded by mud, the nine-week competition is for a growing army for which too much cricket isn’t enough.
About half of the 1400 players enlisted in 70 teams occupying four divisions across mainly the north and western suburbs are from the subcontinent where, famously, the game is played and watched with a quasi-religious fervour.
The growth has been startling since MYCA’s initial year, 2010, when nine teams filled a single division in the carefully named “mid-year” association, “winter” having being eschewed for its negative connotations.
Winter players of 2014 are sensible dressers; hoodies are allowed, even encouraged. But they must be uniformly coloured, so “if one player’s in orange, they’re all in orange”, a motley crew of a dozen umpires (of which this writer was one) was instructed amid the oak panelling and historic photos of Cricket Victoria’s boardroom in Jolimont.
This writer prepared to duck or fling himself to the turf as the aforementioned behemoth batsman, South Australia-contracted allrounder Trent Lawford, laid waste to some rather ordinary, even damp-squid, bowling.
The straight sixes of Lawford were of a frightening velocity. Never in the hunt for its 288 target, Gellibrand sent in Ryan Caiger, aged 12, at No.11 to fight a rearguard action.
With the Wyndhamvale bowlers halving their pace, Craiger, not much taller than his bat, took a single to mid-off and retired not out as Gellibrand succumbed for 128.
The conquering Wyndhamvale side had hit 25 sixes.
While sodden outfields require boundaries to be cleared on the full or first bounce, winter cricket can also cause players to be painfully grounded. Last year, a pace bowler “did the splits” as his front foot skidded on a slippery synthetic surface. While his teammates celebrated a win, he lay on a hospital bed nursing torn adductor muscle fibres.
An unwritten rule governing the mid-year comp is to come off the ground if it’s dangerous or anyone drowns. The matches are played for fun. Why else would you play in the rain? When stumps approached at Newport, a catch-cry was, “C’mon on, guys, it’s beer o’clock”.
Mid-year cricket was started by sports innovator and former motel owner-operator John Hammer of Brighton. In 1980, Hammer devised a super-rules football competition for retired players in four age groupings, from over-35s to over-50s.
In 2003, Hammer, now 78, launched an over-60s Victorian competition for fellow cricket “tragics”.
Although most of the competition’s players also bat and bowl in summer, a few are neophytes.
Strathmore Heights Cricket Club secretary Stephen Fielding never much liked cricket as a young man, but when his two sons took up the game at school he joined summer cricket at the age of 42.
Now, at 58, he’s a wicketkeeper and is chuffed that he holds his club’s (summer and winter comp) record for most stumpings – 64.
